Robert Wiene

Robert Wiene (c. 1881-1938), German Expressionist film director. Wiene directed Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1919; The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), perhaps the most famous German film of all time.

Wiene’s place and year of birth are questionable, although it is thought that he was born in 1881 in Breslau. His sensational 1919 silent film Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss) sought to transfer theatrical and Expressionistic elements to the new cinematographic art form. Correspondingly, Wiene worked with painted scenery and falling, abstract, muddled sets to make the filmed outside world seem to mirror the inner conflict of his characters. The film was Expressionist in content as well: he tells the stories of the demonic hypnotist Caligari, who encourages a somnambulist to commit several murders. The investigations of a student reveal that the showman is also the director of a lunatic asylum and that he uses his patients for his crimes. Weakness of will, abuse of power, genius, and madness are its central themes.

After Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari, Wiene made many more Expressionist silent films, including Genuine (1920), Raskolnikow (1923), adapted from the novel Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, I.N.R.I. (1923; Crown of Thorns), and Orlacs Hände (1925; The Hands of Orlac), the last being a fantastic masterpiece about a pianist who, after he has had his hands transplanted with those of a murderer, becomes a murderer himself, against his will. After Der Rosenkavalier, for which Wiene used 10,000 extras and at whose widely acclaimed premiere at the Dresden Staatsoper in 1926 Richard Strauss himself conducted, the director turned to light entertainment with Der Andere in 1930, a sound film about a schizophrenic public prosecutor, who, to overcome his dark existence as a criminal, must battle with himself. Wiene’s operetta-film Eine Nacht in Venedig (1934; A Night in Venice) turned out to be more sweetly conventional. In 1934 Wiene made Polizeiakte 909, then left Germany to escape National Socialism (Nazism). He died on July 17, 1938, in Paris. The director Robert Siodmak completed Ultimatum in 1938 after Wiene’s death.